Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!dogie.macc.wisc.edu!uwvax!puff!cat28!blochowi
From: blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Shrinkit/Binary II stuff
Message-ID: <2814@puff.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 19 May 89 19:54:48 GMT
References: <8905190506.AA19084@obsolete.UUCP>
Sender: news@puff.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: blochowi@cat28.CS.WISC.EDU (Jason Blochowiak)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 37

In article <8905190506.AA19084@obsolete.UUCP> delton@pro-carolina.UUCP (Don Elton) writes:
>Network Comment: to #2734 by obsolete!nicholaA%moravian.edu%relay.cs.net
> [...] The only systems that can really
>handle .SIT (stuffit) files without MacBinary headers are Mac systems since
>you can't expect Compuserve, the Source etc to write in special code to
>accomodate Macs.  If you download a straight SIT file it won't have the proper
>file type on the Mac disk unless MacBinary is used to pacakage the SIT file
>when it was originally uploaded.
	This is (as far as I'm aware) correct - but ShrinkIt doesn't need the
filetype/auxtype to be able to recognize it's files, and it doesn't need them
in order to properly retain the filetype/auxtype of the files that it holds
within an archive. So, a host doesn't have to handle the file any differently
than a text file, which seems like a reasonable limitation :) The one exception
that I could see to this would be listing the contents of an archive, which is
trivial, as well as non-essential (given a reasonable description of the
archive).

>Perhaps comm programs should automatically
>package SHK files as Binary II if they aren't already in Binary II format at
>the time of an upload.  Upon download they would be extracted out of the
>Binary II file and ready for decompression with Shrinkit.  For folks with
>programs that don't do auto-binary II on uploads, Shrinkit should ideally let
>the user put the file into that format.
	What purpose would this serve? Given that ShrinkIt (and anything else
that deals with NuFX archives like it's supposed to) does not require what
the Binary ][ header would preserve... This seems like redundancy to me, as
the files would already be "ready for decompression with ShrinkIt".

>UUCP: [ sdcsvax nosc ] !crash!pro-carolina!delton
>ARPA: crash!pro-carolina!delton@nosc.mil
>INET: delton@pro-carolina.cts.com


 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
		Jason Blochowiak (blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu)
			"Not your average iconoclast..."
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------